The essential premise of the human-centered technology paradigm was clearly formulated by Howard Rosenbrock in the 1970s: technology should enrich rather than impoverish people’s work and life conditions. The increasing influence of technology in modern societies has been seen by some as offering great promise for the future, but by others as creating the electronic surveillance and/or manipulation of human genes, minds and beliefs. This paper approaches technological worlds as cultural visions in order to discuss and reflect the paradoxical process (...) of viewing technology as part of a hope for a more sustainable and human-centered future as well as part of an apocalypse of surveillance, violence and catastrophes. (shrink)

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's approach to science is a radical departure from the Cartesian-Newtonian scientific framework and offers contemporary science a pathway toward the cultivation of an alternative approach to the study of the natural world. This paper argues that the Cartesian-Newtonian pathway is pathological because it has as its premise humanity's alienation from the natural world, which sets up a host of consequences that terminate in nihilism. As an alternative approach to science, Goethe's "delicate empiricism" begins with the premise (...) that humanity is fundamentally at home in the world: a notion which forms the basis for a Goethean science that gives primacy to perception, offers a more organic and holistic conception of the universe, and has as its goal the cultivation of aesthetic appreciation and morally responsive obligation to the observed. As an antidote to nihilism and as the basis for a more fulfilling and morally responsive science, Goethean science may serve as a kind of cultural therapeutics, a project which is necessarily interdisciplinary since it requires the integration of multiple ways of seeing from the natural sciences, the human sciences, and the humanities. (shrink)

A Heideggerian reading of J.H. van den Berg's writings contributes to an appreciation of phenomenological psychology as a cultural therapeutics. Both van den Berg's structural phenomenology of human existence and his Metablectic theory of historical changes lead to a notion of culture as a disclosive construction of the world. Our technological culture, in its reduction of all forms of relatedness to functionality (what van den Berg refers to as secularization), has repressed the spiritual dimension of contemporary life. The resultant derangement (...) of social existence gives rise to the individual distress brought in to psychotherapy. Attention to the spiritual unconscious is the ethical obligation of phenomenological psychology that transcends, and in so doing contextualizes considerations of professional competency. (shrink)

. Values in the cultural timescapes of science. Cultural Values: Vol. 2, No. 2-3, pp. 385-402.

This paper argues that spatial contingencies, defined by the relationship between where historical actors are in the narrative and what they say, are crucial for understanding the political and ideological effects of Thucydides' History. A comprehensive approach to these contingencies is linked to two related premises. First, that the city of Athens is the principal spatial referent in the History and, second, that Athens refers both to a set of “real” topographical features and to a transcendent and trans-historical ideal that (...) exceeds those features. The dynamic between these two is mediated by Athens' inevitable defeat and by the related conflict between the History as the presentation of facts about the past, on the one hand, and as the source of future predictions, on the other. Framing this analysis are the distinctive characteristics ascribed to the Athenians as a collective and to the positions of Thucydides and Alcibiades as Athenians in exile. (shrink)

Freud's 1911 case study based on Schreber's Memoirs of My Nervous Illness provides the investigator with the opportunity to reexamine Freud's interpretation through a return to the original data Freud used. This study reveals both the insights and limitations of Freud's theory of paranoia. An alternative interpretation of the case is overed from an existential-phenomenological perspective which aims both to expand upon and transform Freud's study without negating its value. Freud draws on the mythologies of the sun to argue for (...) his hypothesis that the "father-complex" lies behind Schreber's God. By following some of the many other mythological themes in Schreber's memoirs, Freud's interpretation is opened to a larger, socially and historically situated context. An examination of cross-cultural and historical studies of mystical experience shows how Schreber's psychosis is simultaneously a form of madness and spiritual breakthrough. Schreber's is viewed as a narcissistic experience of the infant-child in which the imaginal has been exiled from rational, modern adulthood and is inaccessible to Cartesian language. Instead of recognizing the soul-full world of "miracles," Schreber envisions the absorption of the entire world into himself and he thus becomes an inflated caricature of the "heroic ego" at its extreme. (shrink)

This essay applies the material developed in The Wounded Researcher to education. The core issue in that book is the necessity to make a place for the complex unconscious in research in order to lay a foundation for an ethics that is based in deep subjectivity. The therapy room has characteristically been the place where this kind of work has occurred, and in this regard therapy has been a form of education. The boundaries of the therapy room have, however, exploded (...) and, given the awesome powers of technology to develop and communicate information, how do we make a place for the unconscious in our educational practices? Drawing upon the work of Carl Jung this essay addresses the following questions: How does one make a place for the unconscious in the classroom, without turning teaching into therapy?; How does a teacher make a place for the unconscious dynamics in the complex interactive field among himself/herself, the students, and the material without overwhelming students?; What are the limits and dangers of this effort?; What are the consequences if we continue to ignore these dynamics in the bodies of knowledge we build? Examples from teaching my book to graduate students in psychology are provided. (shrink)

C. G. Jung offers education a unique perspective of the dilemma of collective social demands versus individual needs. Indeed, so radical and profound is his vision of the learning psyche as collectively embedded, that it addresses the current crisis over the demand for utilitarian higher education. Hence post‐Jungian educationalists can develop creative classroom strategies, for example in the United States, Canada and Brazil. The article revises two Jungian ideas in order to teach literature by promoting personal and social growth. By (...) taking Jung's categories of literature as categories of reading and by using his notion of therapeutic ‘healing fiction’ to understand literary narrative, both social and psychic individuation and transformation are facilitated. (shrink)

Dorothea Olkowski _Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation_ Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999 ISBN 0-520-21693-8 298 pp.